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R.E.M.
New Adventures in Hi-Fi
(Warner Bros.)
First Appeared in The Music Box, April 2005, Volume 12, #4
Written by John Metzger
New Adventures in Hi-Fi, the tenth studio outing in
R.E.M.’s canon, should have been an utter disaster. In the wake of the mammoth
success of Automatic for the People, the band was struggling to find
direction, and in an attempt to recapture the urgency of its early albums, it
opted to write and record material while on an 11-month tour in support of its
most unimaginative effort Monster. Further complicating matters was the
fact that during its sojourn, drummer Bill Berry suffered a life-threatening
brain aneurysm, singer Michael Stipe was rushed into surgery to treat an
inguinal hernia, and bass player Mike Mills, after complaining of abdominal
pain, was hospitalized to treat an adhesion of his small intestine. Such serious
health problems are bound to make a group become reflective, and not
surprisingly, much of its new collection of songs dealt with the issue of
mortality, though it was delivered with the sort of wearily disconnected sense
of loneliness and despair that only an endless stream of nearly identical hotel
rooms and concert arenas could provide.
With or without these difficulties, R.E.M. was facing a mid-life crisis, but
even if New Adventures in Hi-Fi was too much of a hodgepodge — both
lyrically and musically — to be considered anything close to perfect, it did
manage to pull the band out of its creative funk. For the record, the group
never has been one to make dramatic shifts in its sonic palette, although an
examination of its catalog in 10-year increments yields striking alterations in
its sound. Indeed, Murmur is quite distinct from Automatic for the
People, which in turn is remarkably different from Around the Sun.
Yet, the progressions revealed on the intervening outings were little more than
a series of slow, gradual steps in directions that went both forward and
backward.
The underlying plan for New Adventures in Hi-Fi was to unite the
road’s urgency with the aural textures available in a recording studio. This
served as the impetus for rejuvenating R.E.M.’s interest in experimentation,
thereby allowing it to regain its momentum. Though large portions of the album
were devoted to the crunchy, arena-sized rock of Monster — a product, no
doubt, of the songs’ geneses at a series of pre-show sound checks — there
definitely was something greater at stake on this album as opposed to its last
effort. For example, the rousing fury of The Wake-Up Bomb was enveloped
within a murkily ominous swirl of organ, and this, along with the many other
subtle shadings that graced the material on New Adventures in Hi-Fi, has
become even more prominent in the album’s recent incarnation as a DVD-Audio set.
In fact, its surround-sound headiness — from the dissonantly jazz-tinged piano
chords that blossom from the center of How the West Was Won and Where It Got
Us to Patti Smith’s ghostly backing vocals on E-Bow the Letter and
from the crackling distortion of Undertow to the spiraling, black hole-ish
gravity of Leave — significantly improves the best moments on the outing
simply by adding an emotional dimensionality to the material that previously had
been submerged beneath the tracks’ grey-toned arrangements.
Whether Stipe is commenting on the spread of American consumerism in How
the West Was Won and Where It Got Us, decrying the growth of seedy talk
shows on New Test Leper, or simply relaying R.E.M’s collective yearning
to escape from its rut and rediscover its artistic drive — most notably on
Bittersweet Me, Leave, and The Wake-Up Bomb — the tunes
inevitably become more compelling in their newly minted, three-dimensional
state, and as a result, they resonate more greatly than ever. Of course, it
helps to have a halfway decent batch of songs with which to work, but if
technology can salvage a middling, transitional effort such as New Adventures
in Hi-Fi, perhaps it also can resuscitate rock ’n‘ roll itself.  ½
New Adventures in Hi-Fi [CD/DVD] is available from
Amazon.com. To order, Click Here!
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New Adventures in Hi-Fi [CD Only] is available from
Amazon.com. To order, Click Here!
For Canadian orders, please
Click Here!
For UK orders, please
Click Here!
Ratings
1 Star: Pitiful
2 Stars: Listenable
3 Stars: Respectable
4 Stars: Excellent
5 Stars: Can't Live Without It!!
Copyright © 2005
The Music Box
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